Brewers

Currently I am reading Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. I have learned some interesting things about some of the anti-prohibitionists, yep, you guessed it, the beer brewers. But look at the things I have found out about names I have heard for decades:

pg. 31, "The most forceful advocate of the brewers' anti-Prohibition campaign was the most accomplished man in the industry, Adolphus Busch. The youngest of twenty-one children of a prosperous Rhineland merchant . . . in 1861 at twenty-two, married Lilly Anheuser, the daughter of one of his customer. . . Busch was a genuine visionary. Where others saw brewing as a fairly straightforward business, he saw it as the core of a vertically integrated series of businesses. He built glass factories and ice plants. He acquired railway companies to ferry coal from mines he owned in Illinois . . .got into the business of manufacturing refrigerated rail cars . . . He paid one million dollars for exclusive U.S. to a novel engine technology developed by his countryman Rudolf Diesel . . .

Pg. 32, "In 1875 Busch produced thirty-five thousand barrels of beer; by 1901 his annual output - primarily of a light lager named for the Bohemian town of Budweis - surpassed a million barrels."

Famous Last Words

I periodically get out a little book I have called Famous Last Words and read the entry about Conrad Hilton, the hotel giant. It tickles me, I don't know why, just so funny and unexpected to read what his last words were. Here is an excerpt from the book:

Born in San Antonio, New Mexico, Hilton began his career by renting out rooms in his adobe home. He took a job as a local bank cashier, eventually purchased a bank of his own and later assumed control of a small hotel in Cisco, Texas, in 1919. Over the next sixty years, he built an international hotel empire. On his deathbed in 1979, Hilton was asked if he had any last words of wisdom. He did.

"Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub."
Conrad Hilton